Heterogenous Mobile Computing Meets the Federated Cloud

Most people fail to realize that cloud computing was made for mobile computing devices. Just about every user of a mobile computing device touches a cloud service somewhere.

But all those cloud computing services are silos of data. Syncplicity, which offers a file-synchronization service for mobile computing devices, heralds a future when this issue will be overcome because files can be synchronized using a Syncplicity service hosted on an Amazon cloud and with GoogleDocs applications.

This week Syncplicty added support for a newsfeed service that makes it possible to track in real time all the activity around any given file and a console to help manage that process. According to Syncplicity CEO Leonard Chung, this means that groups of mobile users can work collaboratively on a file regardless of the device they are using. The latest version of the Syncplicity service adds Macintosh support and a future update will add support for the iPad.

This means that the day is at hand when groups can seamlessly share files via the cloud without having to store files in a specific portal on the Web. As nice as it is might be to have a specific place to put those files, most of the work being done on any given file is ad hoc on the local client. And as cloud computing evolves, it shouldn't matter whether that file came from GoogleDocs, Microsoft Office or anywhere else. It should just simply be accessible whenever and wherever required.